FANCI Projecthttp://www.fanci-project.eu
Face and Body Analysis Natural Computer InteractionThu, 13 Jul 2017 08:23:31 +0000en-GBhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8Smart cities need smart cars: In the future, your car will be able to “see” through buildingshttp://www.fanci-project.eu/future-through-buildings/
Sat, 27 May 2017 20:48:25 +0000http://fanci-project.eu/?p=2008Thanks to V2X technology, connected cars will soon be able to tell you what lies way ahead or around the corner

we do know that wireless connectivity will play a much more important role than it does now, primarily offering passengers an internet connection and GPS navigation.

Today many cars use radar for collision avoidance, and self-driving cars rely on cameras, radars and lidars (highly precise light-based sensors) to navigate their routes. But this small demonstration in Las Vegas showed the power that wireless technology has to provide vehicles with yet another set of “eyes” that can detect objects much further away even if they’re blocked from view. This technology can help drivers and self-driving cars to not only avoid collisions but also send and receive all kinds of data to help smooth the flow of traffic and conserve fuel.

This wireless vehicle-to-everything communication, known in shorthand as V2X, will become more widely adopted as urban developers from Singapore to New York City install more “smart city” transmitters into infrastructure, such as toll booths, street lights and road signs. In the U.S., the Department of Transportation issued an advance rule in December to eventually mandate that all new cars come equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V, wireless transmitters as a new standard safety feature to avoid collisions. If the standard is applied, it would speed up the number of cars on the road equipped with the technology that could support V2X.

How does V2X technology work?

There are a lot of sensors being integrated into cars, like cameras and radars. The automotive industry has been looking at using Wi-Fi and cellular radio technology as another sensor. V2X is the use of radio technology in cars for the purposes of active safety. It can communicate with anything around it.

Today’s cars, just like cell phones, have Wi-Fi and cellular radios. But traditionally they have been used to enable connectivity. If you want a hot spot in the car you use the Wi-Fi or the cellular radio. These can also be used for crash-avoidance.

Among the limitations of the camera and radar sensors is that they rely on line of sight. Take for example at an intersection: These camera and radar sensors need to see the car before they can predict the possibility of an accident. But when you use Wi-Fi or cellular radio to communicate between two connected cars from around a corner, for example, they are able to get enough information about each car’s position and route ahead of time to avoid collision.

It sounds like the cars with these transmitters have kind of “X-ray vision”!!!

]]>What If Driverless Cars Let You Cross The Street When You Wave At Them?http://www.fanci-project.eu/driverless-cross-street/
Thu, 23 Feb 2017 09:38:37 +0000http://fanci-project.eu/?p=2003Crossing a busy street might be easier in a driverless future. In Blink, a new concept designed for driverless cars, when you want to cross–and you’re not at a crosswalk–you can hold up your hand, and the car will stop and light up with a green walk signal on the windshield and rear window. If you don’t want to cross, you can wave the car ahead, and it will signal that it understands.

The Blink design integrates an organic light-emitting diode display into the windscreen and rear window of the car and uses light signals to show pedestrians when the car is aware of their presence. If the car’s sensors detect a pedestrian nearby, a figure lights up that mirrors their movements, accompanied by a bleep. If a pedestrian raises their hand as a stop sign, the figure turns green, and the car is prevented from moving forward. If they place a hand out to the side to motion the car forward, the figure turns red and the car can continue.

That’s the idea behind Blink–a new “language” for autonomous vehicles that would teach them to recognize and respond to pedestrian hand signals.

The technology responds to gestures using machine learning. While the team has so far trained it to recognize a hand gesturing to stop or keep moving, the system is also designed to continue learning hundreds of other culture-specific gestures.

While some autonomous car concepts signal to pedestrians that it’s safe to cross (one, for example, smiles at pedestrians as it stops), this design allows for two-way communication–and gives pedestrians more power. A raised hand doesn’t always stop the car–if it can’t safely brake in time, it won’t. But on roads designed to favor cars, it helps give pedestrians a voice.

]]>A whole new market for emotion recognitionhttp://www.fanci-project.eu/a-whole-new-market-for-emotion-recognition/
Tue, 07 Jun 2016 12:33:04 +0000http://fanci-project.eu/?p=1447If businesses could sense emotion using tech at all times, they could capitalize on it to sell to the consumer in the opportune moment. The artificial intelligence focused on emotion recognition is a the new frontier that could have huge consequences in not only advertising, but in new startups, healthcare, wearables, education, and more. There’s a lot of applications and API-accessible software online that parallels the human ability to discern emotive gestures. These algorithm driven APIs use use facial detection and semantic analysis to interpret mood from photos, videos, text, and speech.

The visual detection market is expanding tremendously. It was recently estimated that the global advanced facial recognition market will grow from $2.77 Billion in 2015 to $6.19 Billion in 2020. Emotion recognition takes mere facial detection/recognition a step further, and its use cases are nearly endless.

User response to video games, commercials, or products can all be tested at a larger scale, with large data accumulated automatically, and thus more efficiently. Technology that reveals your feelings has also been suggested to spot struggling students in a classroom environment, or help autistics better interact with others. Some use cases include:

A glimpse of the Emotion Recognition philosophy

From a scientifical point of view, emotive analytics is an interesting blend of psychology and technology. A core set of emotions have been shown to be universally conveyed by facial expressions around the world: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. So, the real challenge is to reliably detect and extract the micro expressions by analyzing the relationship between points on the face and the modeled emotions.

It is then evident that the first crucial step is to choose the correct features. Usually, two types of features are often taken into consideration: geometric features and appearance features: the first represent the face in terms of shape and location of the principal facial characteristics such as nose, mouth, eyes; the second describe faces in terms of texture, therefore considerating wrinkles, bulges, furrows. This is why we can often see something like a fishnet mask over our faces when trying emotion recognition demo software. This mask is composed of our characteristic face landmarks [3,4], which are unique for each person and, at the same time, general enough to describe a face (model).

The second step in the procedure consists in defining a decision/classification rule which associates the synthetic representation of the face with the “correspondent” facial expression. The expression recognition methods can be thought as two types of analysis: one is focused on extracting the emotion (with or without a reference) on the single frame [6, 7], while the other considers the sequence of the images referred to a single person [5, 8]. If these two types of analysis are not joint in some way, there can be limitations on the performances. For example, every classification method consists, in general, in associating any two examples having the same features to the same corresponding class. In the case of modelling the perception of a mood state, facial expressions are ambiguous and different people might perceive differently the same expression, thus leading to errors in assessing the emotion. Moreover, there is also the need of incorporating human expertise to simplify, accelerate and improve the modelling process.

Therefore, new approaches [1] tend to model the possible ambiguities in human perception of static facial expressions and improve the descriptiveness of a face by introducing a more complete set of contextual features. In August 2006 Sorci and Antonini [2] published the internet facial expressions evaluation survey in order to find a way to directly get humans’ perception of facial expressions. The aim of the survey is to collect a dataset created by a sample of real human observers, from all around the world, doing different jobs, having different cultural backgrounds, ages and gender, belonging to different ethnic groups, doing the survey from different places (work, home, on travel, etc.). The images used in the survey comes from the Cohn–Kanade database [9].

Facial Detection APIs that Recognize Mood

Computer vision APIs for mood recognition use facial detection, eye tracking, and specific facial position cues to determine a subject’s mood. There are many APIs that scan an image or video to detect faces, but these go the extra mile to spit back an emotive state. This is often a combination of weight assigned to 7 basic emotions, and valence — the subject’s overall sentiment. Here it is a list of the most popular APIs for Emotion Recognition.

1 – Google Cloud Vision

Google has released a beta for its latest cloud-based application program interface, which can detect faces, signs, landmarks, objects, text and even emotions within a single image. The Cloud Vision APIs can also detect facial features, allowing it to find images that display certain emotions. This means Google’s cloud platform can technically detect fear just as well as it can identify a taco or a goldfish. It is a pay-service for which developers can begin working with Google Cloud Vision API starting today, with the first 1,000 uses of each feature free per month. Those looking to sift through even more photos than that can expect to pay between $0.60 to $5 a month per feature, depending on usage. As always, need to pay attention to Google next moves on this field, they often raised benefits from diffusing simple and powerful tools to developers.

2 – Project Oxford by Microsoft

Microsoft’s Project Oxford is a catalogue of artificial intelligence APIs focused on computer vision, speech, and language analysis. The APIs only works with photos. The Emotion API for Video recognizes the facial expressions of people in a video, and returns an aggregate summary of their emotions. You can use this API to track how a person or a crowd responds to your content over time. The emotions detected are anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise. Upload a photo to the free online demo here to test Project Oxford’s computer vision capabilities. As for Google, also Microsoft seems to be very interested in the developers’ community, which already has helped Microsoft to expand the Kinect market.

3 – Emotient

Emotient is now part of Imotions, which syncs with Emotient’s facial expression technology, and adds extra layers to detect confusion and frustration. The Imotions API can monitor video live feeds to extract valence, or can aggregate previously recorded videos to analyze for emotions. Particularly interesting is the possibility of combination with stimuli, eye-tracker, EEG, GSR (and others) as well as the application to a sensitive situation like car driving.

4 – Affectiva

With 3,289,274 faces analyzed to date, Affectiva is another solution for massive scale engagement detection. They offer SDKs and APIs for mobile developers, and provide nice visual analytics to track expressions over time. Visit their test demo to graph data points in response to viewing various ads. Interesting also the gaming perspective, where a new generation of games will adapt themselves to our emotions.

Founded at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), FacioMetrics is a company that provides SDKs for incorporating face tracking, pose and gaze tracking, and expression analysis into apps. Moreover, they implement Dense 3D tracking to improve results. Their demo video outlines some creative use cases in virtual reality scenarios. The software can be tested using the Intraface iOS app.

Bonus – Face++

Face++ is more of a face recognition tool that compares faces with stored faces — perfect for name tagging photos in social networks. Anyway, it does determine if a subject is smiling or not. Face++ has a wide set of developer SDKs in various languages and examples, and an online demo. Moreover, the “default” demo shows the concept of facial landmarks, which are the basis for all the applications involving the face, wheter they are focused on recognition, mood detection, authentication, alterations.